


The Orphan's Cradle

by aejrogota



Category: 'n Verlore Verstand, Final Fantasy XIII Series, Final Fantasy XIII-2, Old Man's Journey, Rime (Video Game), Submerged (Video Game)
Genre: Allegory, Angst, Canon-Compliant, Crossover, Description-driven, Diving, Dream Sequences, Drowning, Five Stages of Grief, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Magical Realism, Novelization, Self-Harm, Short Story, Suicide, for FFXIII series, my first multichapter fanfic, or at least an attempt at it, some horror elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-12 11:34:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 5,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28509753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aejrogota/pseuds/aejrogota
Summary: Vanille processes a great grief as she passes the centuries in crystal slumber.(This is a much darker and relatively loose novelization of the puzzle game Rime which allegorizes much of Vanille's character arc in the FFXIII trilogy. It is written for an audience which has only played the FFXIII series but might also be appreciated by those who have only played Rime.)
Kudos: 1





	1. So Shrill, The Cry

**Author's Note:**

> I was really taken by the plotline of the indie puzzle game Rime (a game which, by the way, I highly recommend to anyone looking for an emotional and bittersweet 5+ hour diversion!). As a central theme of FFXIII is confronting and overcoming grief, it seemed almost natural that one of its character's stories might fit neatly into Rime's plot beats. Note that reading this fic will not directly spoil anything that happens in Rime...or FFXIII, for that matter.
> 
> Outside of Rime, other visually and emotionally evocative elements were incorporated based on inspiration from scenes in the indie games ‘n Verlore Verstand, Submerged, and Old Man’s Journey. Others yet are extrapolated from my own experiences as a scuba diver. 
> 
> Note that particular fandoms, tags, and allegorical character cameos are indicative of their presence in any of the chapters plotted out for this work, including those which haven't yet been published.

Warm and salty water lapped playfully upon Vanille’s face as she roused. It pooled in cyclic spurts against her outsprawled arms and elbows, leaving shallow divots in the earth where it eddied, and light scouring streaks where it regressed. Her right cheek was pressed into the soft sand. The rest of her body was barely submerged in the shallows, gently tugged about amidst the shifting waves. She opened her eyes to a transient bout of double vision as her mind rounded a blind bend to greet her widening senses. 

Miniscule flecks of mica glistened across her field of view in wide four-pointed stars. With a few hard blinks they resolved into speckles scattered far and wide across the beachhead. Her deep and lazy breath invited air of an earthen scent; it was subtly tinged with the familiar must of stranded brackish fines. Vanille giggled to herself and softly smiled, basking in the warmth of the moment. Next to her face was a rune bracelet which the waves had likely knocked from her wrist; she wiggled her left hand towards it and slipped it back on.  


Familiar sounds of children’s laughter and the clanging of cutlery and cookware folded thickly into the sultry breeze anointing her head. The euphony filled her ears; it tugged at her curiosity enough for her to crane her head upwards, away from the sleepy comfort of the earth. Vanille’s eyes traced the rusticated contour of the stout granite seawall, searching for the source of those voices. 

There was no one else on the beach nor on the promenade above her. The schoolhouse was quiet and she could not make anyone out through its windows. Beyond the highway bridge to the vestige and the sanctuary Tharsis, the hills on the far side of the lake were green and vibrant. They burgeoned with the buzzing of insects and the calls of errant wyverns and spooks. Nature’s overture was occasionally punctuated by the staggered harmonical cry of a distant daemon in heat. The sky was bright, open, weighty with white puffy clouds fed by streams of rising steam from the dense forests beyond. She pulled herself to her feet and propped herself against the seawall. Vanille squeezed the water from her clothes, set aside her boots, and roughly brushed as much salt and wet sand from herself as would care to budge. 

Vanille traced the pathway guardrail with the pads of her left hand’s fingers, ascending up and up the stairs with squeals of breathless vigor as she returned to the town’s central plaza. Effigaic statues of dust stood tall on the ground around her. Some were posed around each other as if engrossed in conversation; others peered into the distance to behold the vestige and its sanctuary. A few were clustered on mats in the communal dining area below the back end of the orphanage as if scintillated by a well-worn tale. Vanille in any case paid them no mind. She focused on the voices coming from her home.

Vanille carefully chose her steps on the rough-sawn planks of the orphanage’s stairwell. Her hand reached out to the corrugated metal wall at right, tracing every passing undulation and rivet. With a left turn she reached the open front door and stepped inside, careful not to step on Bhakti, who had rushed in cheery greeting to the doorside. Mancala boards and small stuffed and wooden animals were scattered all around the room; they were gently buffeted by oily olive-grey shimmers that fluttered about the space. As shade by shade passed nonchalantly around Vanille, their childlike laughs bowed around her mind like horns on a passing train. It warmed her heart to hear their happiness. 

She walked over to her bed and sat down, attuned keenly to the groan of its springs. Across from her, a shade cloaked in white light appeared; Vanille hawed softly in surprise. As she beheld it an entirely different kind of warmth pulsed across her body, flowing from her neck’s veins into her chest and sending tingles to the tips of her fingers. Although Vanille could not see its eyes or face, she knew it looked to her expectantly.

She reached out hesitantly for its hand. It was warm and steady. It opened its shoulders and turned to her more fully as if beckoning an embrace. Vanille accepted and threw herself entirely into its arms. But Vanille was distraught when it suddenly seized onto her. Its grip was so tight it was painful. The white shade pulled Vanille off-balance and tilted them both backwards until they fell off the far side of its bed. Vanille squeezed her eyes shut and braced for the pain of the inevitable collision but the shock never came.


	2. The Road to Predation

When she awakened, Vanille was sinking in a dark, dark sea. As she looked up she began to panic; no light filtered in from the realm above. Her remaining breath would not carry her across life’s edge back into her world.

Laminar streams of warm viscous fluid flowed across her face in a film of subparallel rows, tendrilled capillaries of a force pressing her deeper and deeper into the dark. She struggled desperately; every kick and wave chaotically shed vortices in her downward wake, brushing against her legs in lobate whirls of wicked protest.

She could not tell if it made any difference. The only thing that tempered her efforts in the end was her exhaustion. Vanille spent the last of her lung’s breath, and she surrendered.

Her body began to heave. It gulped for air it could not find and pulled the darkness in instead. It filled her lungs with so much of it that it began to cause her to choke. But Vanille did not die. The convulsions in her chest began to edge into sharper and sharper stings so incisive she first took them for flurries from some white-hot blade.

Every passing moment carried her closer to some inevitability beyond her imagination. Every second rendered her smaller and smaller still. She spun her head around, dizzy, unstable in her heaving, hoping to catch a glimpse of the white shade. But it was nowhere to be found. There was nothing she could see of any kind, actually; the darkness was as absolute as her descent.

She opened her mouth to cry out for it, a maudlin fool in the unguarded night. The sound that emerged from her throat was piteous. it was stifled by her drowning, muffled as if through a thick blanket.

She thought maybe it could see what she could not. And perhaps it did. In spite of whatever it saw - if it saw anything at all - it quickly became clear to Vanille that something had been heeded. As if some kind of covenant had been struck.

Below Vanille’s feet emerged a deep-dark crimson sphere. She could not tell where its edges started or where they ended. When she tried to focus her eyes on it, it would flee with the stygian swells and she would again be confronted with the totality of the darkness. As it grew closer, a heat began to twinkle in the tips of her toes. It was almost soothing at first; Vanille focused on the feeling to try to distract from her spasmodic pains and her exhaustion. But the rising heat began to cause the darkness to shiver and pool. The world began to swill, the violence of its spiral ragdolling her body in dizzy rings.

The heat of the fluid had gone from uncomfortable to unbearable. It began to scald her skin, her mouth, and her lungs. She began to violently kick her legs and arms about, writhing haplessly against the pain’s unraveling of her mind. Then all at once the darkness yielded. It retreated past her field of view in jagged sawteeth as that of a torn paper’s edge. The world around her buckled under a deluge of harsh light as the darkness backflushed into the post-cosmic orifice that ejected her.

Respite. Vanille curled into a fetal position. She harrowedly retched the last of the fluid from her lungs. Rivulets of the transparent gel spilled violently from her mouth and nose onto the white sand; it beaded up and then collected in little depressions. The pools of fluid turned a deep opaque crimson and baked the sand beneath it into glass with a sharp hiss.

As her breathing evened, Vanille noticed for the first time how intolerably hot the sun was. Her skin, which still burned from her passage through that sunken place, had already begun to peel under the harshness of its light.

She flipped herself onto her back. Cocoon loomed eerily in the cloudless pale blue sky. It occulted only the land beneath it at this high noon. There were no other shadows. The Hanging Edge gleamed at her unblinkingly, menacingly, an oretoise’s pupil flexing in surveillance of a predator.

Sitting up, Vanille roughly brushed the white sand from her right arm. That single sweep immediately caused her to wince in pain. The smallest glassy grains in the regolith had been angular enough to draw blood on her fingers and forearm under the pressure. She decided not to press her luck any further.

Vanille stood up. The sand was abrasive against the soles of her feet. The dune sea appeared to extend well beyond the fish-eyed stretch of her horizon’s end. She was unsure of where to go; the white shade was not present to guide her. Hoping for respite from the elements she set out in the direction of the shadow of Cocoon.

The seconds between each step stretched into hours. She had already been hobbled by the exhaustion she inherited from the darkness; every pant of exertion eroded her strength a little more, carrying her in degrees from her conscious attachment to the physical world. The sun refused to set by even one arcsecond over the course of her journey. Clouds of dust were stirred by bellowing bursts of hot wind which pressed away from Cocoon; sand collected on her face and in her parched mouth in nettling stings.

As Vanille pulled her heavy eyes upwards over the horizon she saw a vast complex of shuddering greenery in the schlieren-licked distance, though she could not make out any trees. What had once sounded indistinctly like the calls of wyverns and spooks decayed into more hollow crystalline grunts before melding with the rustling of dust devils in the stalling breeze. She swallowed the thick saliva on her tongue and steadied herself against the disorienting soreness which emanated across her temples and forehead.

A familiar but distorted voice met her ears from behind her. Vanille turned around and yelped hoarsely in terror at the Cie’th perched on the last dune’s crest.


	3. I, Juggernaut

Vanille froze in place, crouching slightly to steady herself, as she remembered the fearsome Vercingetorix.

The Cie’th squatted enigmatically on the crest of the dune, craning its head neurotically in a sluggish figure-eight sweep. Its two stiff triangular wings rippled as it stabilized itself against the dune sea’s sustained breeze. With every adjustment it made, each of its wing’s five pallasitic roundels sparked for a split-second, emitting ghostly crackling embers. As Vanille looked at it she noticed an asymmetry; its right wing had grown around a forked turquoise-gold wand and had become fused to it. Around its legs and neck were draped a variegated assortment of beaded ornamental chains. One draped across the midline of its torso and crossed the Cie’th’s old brand, whose eye was studded with a red-orange apple-shaped eidolith.

Vanille decided to run.

A shrill shriek emanated across the dunes as she heard the Cie’th take flight behind her, sending a plume of dust mushrooming into the air. The base of the cloud brushed up against her back and made her eyes water and sting.

As she scrambled up the leeward slope of the next dune, the peripheries of her vision suddenly reddened and grew clouded with grey-gold shimmers. A burst of darkness enveloped a sickly green-yellow globe that detonated in the sand ahead of her; clods of soil spiraled into the air. A down-pitching wobble of a whistle rang shrill in her ears before subsiding into dissonant chime-like clangs. Suddenly, the aberrations in her vision coalesced into a darklit crimson sphere. It collapsed with a burst and a white-hot gust. Vanille’s heart started to pound as she dodged the killing curses Vercingetorix sprayed in her direction.

Every near-miss frayed her mind a little more. Her feet and ankles were scored till they bled from the friction with the sand. However, her primal faculties kept her mobile and nimble enough to stay barely ahead of the Cie’th’s relentless assault. As it continued to chase her across the desert, the dunes they traversed grew larger and larger, becoming more and more difficult to cross.

The magic attacks died down even as Vercingetorix continued to screech from behind her. As Vanille reached the crest of the next dune, a dust-choked windburst pushed up against her back, swiftly followed by a staggering pain in her right shoulder. She was forcefully thrown face-first into the ground and cast down the dune in a chaotic roll. For a split-second she caught a gleam in one of Vercingetorix’s wings spinning in an arc like a boomerang; chunks of flesh and blood spalled off the Cie’th’s bladed sail as it cut across the sky. She lost sight of it as she tumbled down the dune’s stossward side in seeming perpetuum.

At the dune’s root, Vanille sprawled out, prostrate, defeated. She could hear a wave of rapid tapping blows as if curtains of sand were being blown back against a scarp. Dazed, Vanille turned her head as far as she could move it without inviting a most debilitating pain. To her surprise, before her was a vast chasm; she watched whirls of dunestuff press off the edges into the yawning darkness below.

Vercingetorix screamed in the distance. Vanille felt sick to her stomach; she recoiled at the notion of being picked to pieces by the beast.

With a final halting breath and a whimper, she weakly rolled herself off the cliff and plunged into the void beyond.

* * *

Vanille’s last thought was of the warm feeling she shared with the white shade the moment before she was condemned to this trial. Yet her surrender paved a different path; the warmth spread from her core and out through her arms to her hands.

The darkness fled in rout as a soft pink glow extended from her fingertips in sparkling gossamer ribbons. The fine sheets of light graded into broad golden curtains which swirled around her in whispery cascading fleets, baffling the flow of ancient air upwelling from the world’s hidden heart. Vanille’s fall slowed to a near stop as the sandy bottom of the chasm emerged gradually from the deep. It stopped but a finger’s length from the tip of her nose.

The ribbons unwound themselves from her hands as she gently closed the last of the gap between herself and the floor. She was prostrate again amidst subtle swirls of dust in the silent vaunted chamber. The skylit slot above her still filtered in errant rays of the sun’s light, but the sand beneath was deliciously cool. It lulled her deeper into her delirious drowsiness. Congealing blood in the wound across her shoulder chilled her to the point of shivers, stinging as grains of dust from above settled softly on rent tissue and bone. She in any case paid it no mind. She focused on the moment which had met her.

Vanille shifted her arms around foggily. She could sense the movement of objects in the world around her, but they moved around in spite of her, defying her faltering comprehension. Her right elbow bumped into a solid cube. She grabbed a hold of it and fumbled it around in her hands. Vanille noticed the object was an ornately decorated box; engraved on its side was a sea of thin-tongued flames, and a standing creature of some sort which she could not identify. She gingerly shifted the box closer to her face. It was too dark to see anything at first. But as she squinted, a gentle white glow began to illuminate its walls. At first the light was fleeting and distant, but it became bright enough that details on the box’s cover began to emerge. Vanille squinted her eyes before widening them in surprised recognition.

She looked up and saw that the white shade had returned. It stooped beside her and clasped its warm hands over her own as she held the box. The shade moved her palm to its cover and beckoned her to open it. Vanille obliged, revealing an orange eidolith in the shape of a feather.

She could hear the flapping of wings as the Cie’th descended into the chasm in search of her. Its distant screeches had subsided into a choir of quiet distorted whispers as it drew near to her. Her refuge from Vercingetorix had been breached.

The Cie’th perched in a dust-contoured beam of light only a short distance away from where lay. Stress at the prospect of her inevitable discovery charged her veins with a raw and forceful shudder.

Vanille’s distress caused the eidolith to pulse with unfathomable power. It erupted into an enormous cloud of ash and soot. The force of the motion propelled the box clear out of Vanille’s hands and out of her reach; she yelled out in surprise. The billowing black cloud pressed outwards and knocked Vercingetorix flat onto its back before filling the chasm from end to end, blotting out all direct light from above. Red lightning and booming thunder arced within and across the eidolith’s ashen efflux. In a panic, Vercingetorix took flight and attempted to flee back to the surface, but a bolt of lightning shot towards it and discharged directly into its heart. Vanille watched it screech in pain as the roundels in its wings glowed an orange so bright it reflected loudly off the clouds. She watched as it fled further and further away until even the glow of its wings faded into the grey.

From the cloud emerged countless greenbright speckles descending like dander to the floor. The lightshow illuminated Vanille and the walls around her with a soft dancing glow. The first particle reached the floor silently, planting a shimmering violet vortex in the sand no larger than Vanille’s palm. A shade of the same color emerged with a deep exhale before wearily slinking its head floorwards. As more and more lights reached the ground, shades awakened, one after another, congregating tightly with each other as if for warmth in the cold of night.

Vanille sat up to look around before realizing in alarm that her sharp movement would have exacerbated her injury. Yet she wasn’t in any pain at all. Reaching behind her, she cautiously pressed her fingers near the place where Vercingetorix had torn into her shoulder. There was neither blood nor any ill sensation. More confidently, she moved her fingers towards the place of the wound only to find that not even a scar remained to remind her of the bloody noon.

Vanille pulled herself to her feet, collected herself, and took stock of her surroundings. The black cloud had settled into a low stable layer a few dozen meters over her head. Whenever sand fell from the chasm’s distant opening it triggered a series of red static flashes, accompanied by diminuated booms of thunder. The sand itself curled into lazy whorls suspended at the base of the cloud cover.

The room around her began to warm as dozens and dozens of dark shades emerged from the ground. Past them, she could make out the contours of a passageway. Vanille walked carefully towards the shades, hoping to pass around them to the chamber’s exit. She gently squeezed the eidolith in her palm.


	4. The Doomherald

Vanille hesitantly approached the growing crowd of shades which now completely obstructed her pathway forward. She cleared her voice weakly and let slip a beg for pardon, but they didn’t seem to acknowledge her. After a few seconds she decided to press through the crowd as unintrusively as she could manage. She lightly tapped the shoulder of the shade nearest to her, but their point of contact let slip a light as harsh as the desert sun above. The shade collapsed to the ground in convulsions, gasping desperately for breath in sputtering hisses. It haplessly crawled back to the refuge of its companions. But the other shades retreated from their dying peer, kicking sand into its face to frustrate its advance. They shielded themselves anxiously from it and from Vanille.

In its flailing the pained shade brushed the foot of a figure nearby. The second shade also broke out in painful light. Now utterly frantic, the remaining shades shoved the second figure roughly onto the ground and continued to retreat into the room’s far corner. Both shades expired together; their hoods dissolved into white-and-violet ribbons of light which escaped into the cloud cover above, leaving only yellowed skeletons in the dust. Vanille screamed and pushed herself back against the opposite wall as the panicked shades huddled together, holding their hands up to plead for her mercy. She began to sob without restraint or control, whispering apologies to the shades. Her pleadings did little to relieve the completeness of their fear.

Vanille sobbed for a long time. She wanted to make herself so, so small. She sobbed harder at every reminder of her villainy. But she wasn’t sure who she was mourning. She stopped sobbing long before she wouldn’t.

She lifted her head numbly and saw that although the shades still cowered in her presence, they had left the passageway behind them wide open for her. Vanille pulled herself to her feet and walked past them timidly, turning her eyes away from them in her passing.

Vanille took her first tentative step down the stairwell in the dark corridor. Sand collected in its corners and sharp edges but the path’s center was swept free of soil. She placed her hand against the odd angular wall to steady herself as she began her descent. Her fingers traced divots in the smoothed limestone; they closed the gaps within complex bas-relief carvings of a form indecipherable in the darkness.

Vanille reached the base of the stairwell. Her eyes had not yet adjusted to low light but at the end of the hallway she thought she could see stars. She continued her measured advance when suddenly the walls and floor vanished from around her, and all ambient worldnoise subsided into anechoeia. She froze with a sharp breath of fear before she realized that she had not started to fall. A crimson nebular mass graded into deep violet edges above her head, anointing it with an eerie dark red pall.

The eidolith warmed in her palm. When Vanille opened her hand to examine it, the soft light it cast betrayed cables of dust-channeled air which frayed away from the walls and roof of the corridor’s entry. She absentmindedly reached out to touch the stuff with the eidolith in hand. The silent flow of channelized dust began to vibrate rhythmically, melting homogeneously into a bright white tone that began to kink and bend. The white linelight extended into the deep distance and connected to each star and dormant dustflow. It pulsed with a subtle glow with each intersection it made, sprawling until every last star in the sky had become interlinked. The energetic array converged across her entire field of vision into an assembly of well-weaved decahedral symmetries. Their projections patterned out the contours of the corridor ahead of her.

The eidolith began to glow even brighter. It became lighter and lighter until it floated out of her hand entirely. The stone suspended itself a few centimeters ahead of her and in front of her forehead as ghostly halos began to pulse from its core. As the halos reached the spectral outlines of the hallway, they instantly blanched them into cold white stone. Vanille hesitantly moved forward once again; the hallway continued its self-construction with every subsequent step she took. She picked up the pace as the corridor dutifully unfolded before her like a long carpet.

Vanille continued her trek until she noticed that a large number of dark shades had begun to pile into the corridor behind her, obstructing each other with their toppling bodies and grappling desperately forward towards free and open space. Over their heads, Vanille could see that sunlight had begun to spill down the stairwell of the corridor. This meant it had begun to filter brightly into the chamber, having dispelled the clouds from above.

Vanille looked back at the dark shades with an anguish. She urgently broke into an unbalanced and uneven sprint to keep her distance from the fleeing souls. Yet, as she moved too far ahead of them, the hallway behind her began to disintegrate; shades began to fall forward, adrift amidst the stars, writhing for air before at last yielding, their still forms silhouetted in the crimson light. Vanille ran back towards the shades but the eidolith did not reconstruct the parts of the corridor she tried to retrace; she caught herself before she lost her footing and fell too into the void. She watched helplessly as more and more shades pushed each other through the gap in flight from the harshness of the light, until nearly every last one of them had died.


	5. Tyrannicide

Vanille trudged forward with a torpid gait, heavily, numbly. The respite afforded to her by this place no longer brought her comfort. She sought to free itself from her at the first opportunity she found.

The ferocity of the eidolith’s glow flagged considerably after that moment. As it died down, Vanille could no longer see the hallway walls; they had faded into a timid translucence. Through them, it was clear she had long since walked past the lobe of the nebula which had drawn so near to her at the corridor’s entrance. But the crimson cloud’s geometry was lively and dynamic. It skittered far behind her and pancaked itself against the horizon’s edge, seeping perpendicularly into a vertical red wall that stretched for as far up and down as her eye could see. Megaswirls rippled ominously in its face as if embedded into the base of a thunderous anvil cloud. It subtly cast Vanille’s slouching shadow into the shape of some shambling husk.

The sky ahead, she thought, had fewer stars than before.

She continued her sluggish advance. Her mind melded in meditation with the rhythmic drone of her walk until the echo in her step fell suddenly flat. Vanille hesitated. The tiled ground beneath her feet began to rumble and clatter. She moved her right hand back to where she knew the wall to be, and she leaned into it for stability. But there no longer was anything there. Vanille lost her balance and fell ungraciously to the floor.

She hit her temple on the hard ground. A warm and wet-like clang flared across the right half of her skull, wicking along the plane that coaxially bisected her blind-dazed eyes. A metallic taste coated her tongue as pools of the darkest black she had ever seen coalesced in her central vision. It rippled away towards the edges of her sight in chimerical hues.

An enormous dizziness caused her spatial intuition to diverge and to curl. Then, an enormous latent pain. She let loose a ragged cry as impulsive and involuntary as the breath.

Vanille pulled herself back to her feet, but the disorientation did not subside; it merely flowed and ebbed, as if taken by the passing of the tides. Vanille vainly reached out again to steady herself against the wall she could not find. Instead, she fell unsteadily back to her knees, then helplessly planted her back on the ground. Whispers began to emerge from the darkness all around her. Ripples in the suddenly turbulent air transmuted into transient oily dancing slivers. From them grew monstrous mocking hoots, full-throated guttural laughs; just as quickly they subsided again into the cold and formless distance. The sounds closed around her mind as the blades in a camera’s iris. She began to feel claustrophobic.

The stars above her started to streak in demicircular arcs. It was as if Luminous Himself spun her tellurion from His far seat in the Cosmogenesis. A vortex emanated from His eye and grew until it began to siphon from the edges of the crimson wall. It razed and rent it completely, rendering its remains into intermittent mylonitic swirls. A twinkle of white light opened slowly in His eye, growing and growing, until Vanille had to squint and turn her head to protect her own sight. A tiny grey speckle emerged in the heart of the growing harsh light, widening so rapidly that its backdrop dimmed in brilliance, an ecliptic annulus to the darkness of its pupil.

The grey shrieked a distorted crystalline bellow. Vercingetorix had arrived; it was on an approach of breakneck speed. Vanille could not shake the terrible feeling that she had been somehow deceived.

Within seconds, its talon-legs had pierced the flesh of her shoulders on each side, splattering hot flesh on her face and hair. Her right arm spastically contorted backwards and became unresponsive to her command. The Cie’th’s torso collided with hers and squeezed every last bit of air out of her lungs, caving her chest cavity and sending a hot churn of acid and blood rocketing from her mouth. Vanille howled at the impact’s raw and blinding pain, but her voice quickly vanished as she lost her breath to the crush. So taken was she by her agony that Vanille scarcely noticed the Cie’th had forklifted her body out of the void below, restoring her to the dry skies and the endless desert day. All capacity for conscious thought and action fled her mind; every movement became fueled by an explosively primal rage, bypassing all registers of memory and attention, delivering her into a space of sheer autonomic impulse. The dreadnought of her coremost self emerged from an oubliette at the base of her brainstem. It took reckless flight into the ivory towers of her higher mind, commandeering her body in a fit of unprecedented fury.

Vanille thrashed with such force that she distended her limbs. She tore a chunk out of Vercingetorix’s chunder-speckled ankle with her teeth. Her legs kicked forward and caught the lower tip of the long belladonna wand lodged in its right wing, twisting it and tearing some of the monstrous fetid flesh that had grown to enclose it. Vercingetorix shrieked, writhing, contorting involuntarily from its wounds. It had already been dangerously unbalanced by her furious fit of movement, but its moment of faltered flight had caused it to stall. The Cie’th unfurled its legs perpendicularly to the ground far below. Its impaled quarry slipped from its spear-like legs and began to fall.

Vanille’s descent was quickly and repeatedly broken by awnings and platforms of an enormous structure she lacked the presence of mind to recognize. She in any case paid it no mind; she was too far gone to ruminate on her present defiance of the more trivial of two great gravities.

She came to rest on her stomach in one of the upper chambers of the structure. The room’s roof had collapsed long ago, leaving a skylight that had arrested her helpless tumble. In addition to her previous injuries, the battering had covered her body in bruises and lacerations of varying severities. She could summon none of the past few minutes to her memory. Vanille was mystified by her injuries and could vaguely suspect them to be serious; she was surprised that she was not in more pain.

Vercingetorix made its round and had returned to the ancient structure in a rage. Its manner of flight had been rendered permanently uneven by its injuries. The beast perched on the skylight but was too large to comfortably fit through the narrow gap. Screeching, the Cie’th sent whirling wings into the ancient chamber through the skylight. Vanille curled into a fetal position but it quickly became apparent that its blades kept overshooting her location. They ricocheted against an old granite lectern in the distance and along the structure’s many walls, scuffing them all from the force. One of the wings just barely passed by Vanille’s head, exploding a crystal-soil pile which had collected from airfall over years, or decades, or centuries. She choked as she breathed from the abrasive puff of suspended dust. When Vanille opened her watering eyes, revealed from within the disturbed pile was yet another black box.

Vanille struggled with the last of her strength to pull her good arm to the artifact. Carved into its sides were stylized bolts of lightning breaking upon the skinny alleys of some mausoleumaic metropolis. Its skyscrapers were crowded upon an island she did not recognize. Large thin rings of an unknown architectural style encircled the tallest structures in the city. A ten-eyed horse galloped between floating isles of earth in the distant leftward sky. On the rear of the box, Vanille found a single sphere. As she looked at it, it began to emit a soft pinkish glow. She pressed into the sphere with her thumb.

The box opened. Miasmatic silver-trimmed lobes of soot-black material billowed out of its cap, pushing Vercingetorix once again away from her and back into the air. The hot desert sun disappeared as the cloud sprawled instantly beyond the horizon, casting dark grey hues across the entirety of the desert.

A crossbow coalesced in Vanille’s arms with the sound of a puffy airpop and the distant shattering of glass. Her strength restored and wounds healed, she rolled to a kneel and took aim at Vercingetorix. But to her horror, Vanille hesitated. She fired a bolt over its head instead.

Red lightning careened from the sky in a hot flash and struck the bolt from her bow, reflecting upwards, splitting the cloud cover with a boom so thunderous it knocked her onto her back. The entire sky burned over in seconds into a rolling crimson tide. A viscous fluid began to rain from the sky, collecting into millions of identical pools between the rhythm of dunes below. Then, all at once, the entire sandsea burned over into crystal with a raucous and incessant crackle. A vile sour stench drifted upwards into Vanille’s nostrils. Vercingetorix had fled out of her sight, back above the cloud cover, the volume of its screeches diminishing in its errant flight.

Something glowed from behind where she was standing. It was the box she had just opened. Vanille ambled back to it and found a crystal tear and a pink crystal rose within. Both emanated a dim warmth from their cores like the other eidoliths she had seen. Vanille picked each of them up and inspected them carefully before holding them tightly to her heart.


End file.
